Downtown Baltimore has had bus lanes on Pratt and Lombard streets since 2009, but they were not painted red, were rarely enforced, and were frequently ignored by drivers, according to WBAL.

Now, bus lanes on those two streets and several others will get the red paint treatment. The lanes will be enforced by city police and traffic enforcement officers, as well as police from the state-controlled Maryland Transit Authority, which operates the bus and rail system. Motorists face a $90 fine and one point on their license for driving or parking in the bus lane.

All told, nine streets will have bus lanes. Those routes are where the number of people riding in a bus lane is projected to exceed the number of people moving in a single car lane. The Lombard Street bus lane, for example, moves 1,000 people per hour, compared to 700 people per hour in a car lane, according to the MTA [PDF].

In addition to the bus lanes, BaltimoreLink includes transit signal priority on two major routes heading north from downtown and a reorganization of the city’s bus network. Color-coded CityLink routes will run every 10-15 minutes during peak hours, forming a grid downtown and radiating outward. LocalLink routes will provide service between neighborhoods and from suburb to suburb. In addition to the state-run MTA buses, the city will continue to operate its free Charm City Circulator buses downtown.

CMTA supports efforts to revamp bus service, but wants better metrics so the public can determine whether the state is achieving its goals — particularly for the downtown bus lanes, which the alliance says are critical to the success of BaltimoreLink.

“It could be better if they establish benchmarks,” said Brian O’Malley, CMTA’s president and chief executive. “What is the average speed of buses through that corridor, and has it improved with the dedicated lanes? That would be valuable for telling the public why we’re doing this and whether it’s working.”

Pittsburgh has long operated a system of exclusive transitways where only buses are allowed. But once those busways get to downtown streets, the transit priority disappears and bus riders are mired in traffic.

What Indianapolis is doing deserves attention, especially from other spread-out American cities looking to spend their transit dollars as efficiently as possible. The big change is a complete reshaping of bus service, which will be like setting up a brand new transit network.

It’s barely even remembered today, but in the 1970s Washington, DC, had a substantial network of dedicated bus lanes, with plans to expand. Dan Malouff at Beyond DC explains what was lost, and how priority for transit could come back to the city’s streets: Prior to 1976 the DC region had at least 60 miles […]

With Milwaukee looking to implement a BRT system connecting downtown to the suburb of Wauwatosa, Ken Smith of Urban Milwaukee was eager to get a look at how BRT works in Quito, when he was in the city for the recent UN Habitat III summit. The system impressed him, and Smith wonders if Milwaukee will be able to duplicate […]